New Numbers on IRS Liens, Levies, and Seizures

Step right up folks — you won’t want to miss this exciting new attraction — direct to your computer screen from the wilds of deepest Washington,
D.C. — it’s the
Internal
Revenue Service Data Book 2006!

<frog class="kermit"> Yaaaaaaaay! </frog>

I’m going to try to find something interesting in its 84 pages of statistics.
Here goes:

Each year, people like myself file their tax returns but don’t include enough
payment to cover the assessed tax, penalties, and interest. Here’s how much
overdue tax, penalties, and interest have been assessed in each of the past
few years (this doesn’t include the interest and penalties that
continue to accrue on past-due accounts):

year

amount

2003

$46,738,194,000

2004

$50,680,546,000

2005

$57,594,901,000

2006

$69,555,590,000

The IRS
collected almost $41 billion (59%) of this last
year (but this amount does include accrued interest and
penalties, so there’s an apples and oranges aspect to this comparison) — $1.7
billion of this through their new program of outsourcing some cases to private
debt collection agencies. Of the total that was collected, taxpayers sent in
$15 billion (37%) in response to the first nastygram from the
IRS, and
another $13 billion (33%) in response to the second nastygram. The last $12
billion (30%) was recovered through “taxpayer delinquent accounts and
additional actions.”

Liens, levies and seizures are all up over recent years:

year

liens

levies

seizures

2003

544,316

1,680,844

399

2004

534,392

2,029,613

440

2005

522,887

2,743,577

512

2006

629,813

3,742,276

590

Oh, there’s more… but I’ve got my boredom threshold too.

Link dump time:

Ron Jacobs reports on The Showdown at Port Tacoma where anti-war activists are using direct action techniques to try to impede the shipment of war materiel to U.S. forces in the Middle East.

WhatDoIDoWithThis.com looks like it’s trying to be an industrial-grade recycled goods swap meet with an emphasis on construction supplies — might be worth checking out if you’re building or refurbishing.

The Tax Foundation points out a study that seems to support the hypothesis that as a tax system becomes more efficient, the savings don’t get passed on to the taxpayer, but to the government. In other words, if the government can reduce the difficulty and annoyance involved in taxpaying, it can compensate by raising the tax rate!

The Senate Budget Committee has approved a federal budget that increases the IRS enforcement budget to $7.2 billion, well above the already-increased $4.93 billion Dubya requested. The budget would also change the rules about how that enforcement budget is accounted. The IRS has complained that increases to its enforcement budget are unfairly categorized as government expenditures even though they result in a positive “return on investment” to the government. Under the newly-proposed rules, the government could break its discretionary spending limit to provide more money for enforcement.

There’s a new war tax resistance blogger on-line. Welcome to the web, Paul Sheldon of Peaceful Ways.

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